Package request: GDLauncher Carbon

[huantianad]

Project description

GDLauncher is a custom Minecraft launcher written from the ground up in rust and solidJS. Its main goal is to make it easy and enjoyable to manage different Minecraft versions, install modloaders, mods and modpacks from different platforms, bringing the playing and modding experience to the next level!

This launcher is the successor to the old FOSS GDLauncher, rewritten in Rust, using electron. See issue for tracking packaging of original launcher #151244.

Unlike the launcher this is a successor to, building from source may not be a viable option as the launcher loses many features when built from source (from the discord, it "wont connect to our server / no curseforge support and you have to get your own mc auth stuff"). It's worth looking into what exactly is lost when building from source and what alternatives there may be to those (e.g. our own implementations). It might also be beneficial to provide a binary package along side the source package.

Metadata

• homepage URL: https://gdlauncher.com/
• source URL:https://github.com/gorilla-devs/GDLauncher-Carbon
• license: unfree (BSL)
• platforms: linux, darwin

Priorities

Add a :+1: reaction to issues you find important.

[PassiveLemon]

The source built problems might be because of the required API key as said in this section: https://github.com/gorilla-devs/GDLauncher-Carbon#a-quick-note I'm still slowly working on that package but there's very little reference in nixpkgs for packages built with pnpm so I get stuck a lot.

[huantianad]

Yeah unfortunately no one builder yet, but I think there just a few ones you can look at. I assume you already know this but definitely just search pnpm in nixpkgs, I think there's one that vesktop was based off of, that also used pnpm and Rust, like Carbon does.

Hopefully we can get some amount of functionality without an API key, or perhaps we could get our own?

[PassiveLemon]

Yeah I've looked at those couple. I've got my WIP code here: https://github.com/PassiveLemon/lemonix/blob/master/pkgs/gdlauncher-carbon/default.nix but I cant get it to work yet.

Hopefully we can get some amount of functionality without an API key, or perhaps we could get our own?

Apparently you can get your own API key but its for development purposes so it might not be super accessible

[PassiveLemon]

I've been unable to figure out how to get it to build from source unfortunately. However, they do provide an appimage link in their discord server which, afaik, is the only place it can be found. You can use this to install it:

{ lib,
  appimageTools,
  fetchurl,
}:
let
  pname = "gdlauncher-carbon";
  version = "alpha.1702056058";
  src = fetchurl {
    url = "https://cdn-raw.gdl.gg/launcher/GDLauncher__2.0.0-${version}__linux__x64.AppImage";
    hash = "sha256-zzzy0mILrRX/o3o7Ni8WpQCliMhrGWqoXXlz5/j/y+o=";
  };

  appimageContents = appimageTools.extractType2 { inherit pname version src; };
in
appimageTools.wrapType2 {
  inherit pname version src;

  extraInstallCommands = ''
    mv $out/bin/${pname}-${version} $out/bin/${pname}

    install -Dm444 ${appimageContents}/@gddesktop.desktop -t $out/share/applications
    install -Dm444 ${appimageContents}/@gddesktop.png $out/share/pixmaps/gdlauncher-carbon.png
    substituteInPlace $out/share/applications/@gddesktop.desktop \
      --replace 'Exec=AppRun --no-sandbox %U' 'Exec=${pname}' \
      --replace 'Icon=@gddesktop' 'Icon=gdlauncher-carbon'
    cp -r ${appimageContents}/usr/share/icons $out/share
  '';

  meta = with lib; {
    description = "A simple, yet powerful Minecraft custom launcher with a strong focus on the user experience";
    homepage = "https://gdlauncher.com/";
    license = licenses.bsl11;
    mainProgram = "gdlauncher-carbon";
    maintainers = with maintainers; [ ];
    platforms = [ "x86_64-linux" ];
  };
}

They update the version pretty frequently.

[huantianad]

Do you think we can grab the asar and use system electron to avoid extra deps in a FHS?